Apple May Add Pay To iAd; MediaMath Does $1M In Video

Apple is rumored to be bringing its mobile payment system, Apple Pay, to iAd. Digiday reports that the integration would embed a tap-to-buy button in mobile ads, mirroring similar moves by Facebook and Twitter earlier this year. Jeff Malmad, managing director of mobile at Mindshare, said the move might help Apple “close the loop” in terms of attribution. “The mobile experience has transformed the shopping experience” added Malmad, “and the ability to understand what consumers are doing on an aggregate level [with iAd] is very powerful for brands.” More.

MediaMath Doing $1M In Video

MediaMath CEO Joe Zawadzki shared revenue figures in a presentation at financial backer Safeguard Scientifics’ investor day. Among the metrics: The company does $1 million per month in video advertising, mobile is at about 15% of its inventory and 40% of its business is outside the US. Mergers get some of the credit: “When we launched video, for example, quite quickly through an acquisition, we basically built it into the platform within about 17 months.” SeekingAlpha transcript.

Creative + Data

WPP’s Ogilvy & Mather wants to add some data flavor to its creative product through a new unit called OgilvyAmp. So far, more than 300 Ogilvy employees are focused there,doing work for clients like IBM, British Airways, E-Trade, Nestlé and T-Mobile. “Data doesn’t replace creativity,” WPP Data Alliance CEO Nick Nyhan told The New York Times, adding that “great creative has lasting power that data may not have predicted. If the creative is bad, even if it’s well-targeted, it’s still going to bomb.” Read on.

Sizmek Uncorks Dynamic Creative Suite

Dynamic creative: the discipline everyone wants to get into, if only they had the resources and if only the tech could scale. With that in mind, Sizmek launched a dynamic creative suite, designed to work across mobile, social, video and display. Programmatic, said Sizmek’s product marketing manager, Jaime Singson, drives interest in dynamic creative. Traditionally, programmatic advertisers slap together different templates for different audiences, but there’s now demand for more complex tools, such as authoring environments. “Large-scale advertisers like automotive have different creative versions for different DMAs with different dealership locations,” Singson told AdExchanger. “You’ll have different models to push and local offers and different prices.” Sizmek’s product is designed to support these permutations.

Video Bullion

No surprise: With programmatic video platforms flying off the shelves, startups are flocking to the space. Genesis Media unveiled TVGenesis, which lets publishers expose viewers to videos at varying frequency depending on whether they want to maximize yield or engagement. Genesis Media provides backfill on a CPM, CPV or CPCV basis, and publishers can sell the premium, viewable video content themselves. Press release. And, Vdopia unveiled a programmatic buying and selling solution for mobile video. Dubbed Chocolate, it’s built on Vdopia's proprietary .VDO technology. "One of the unique advantages of Chocolate is the capability to provide real-time bidding (RTB) to demand partners which have only basic VAST support but no RTB capability," says CTO Srikanth Kakani. Read that.

Mapping Call Sentiment

Marchex wants to help its customers map and analyze phone calls, including those triggered by mobile ads. Tim Graber, senior director of product and engineering at Marchex, explains, “We built Real-Time Call DNA to reveal all the facets of a conversation, and we are able to do this using technology that anonymously captures data without recording calls. Businesses get immediate, actionable insights on the quality of calls coming from mobile ads – and those insights lead to increased sales performance.” Press release.